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The Snow by Adam Roberts
01/10/2004 . Source: Paul Hanley 
pub: Gollancz. 297 page enlarged paperback. Price: £10.99 (UK). ISBN: 0-575-07181-8. Buy from Amazon US - Buy from Amazon UK
nb: US titles may only be available from Amazon US, and UK titles from Amazon UK. check out website: www.orionbooks.co.uk
The basic premise of this story is that it starts snowing and it just doesn't stop. After a very short while, the snowploughs stop working and thereafter everything else, including governments. Most of the population starves or freezes to death.
I remember reading in a Victorian book on railways that said London was only three days away from starvation and it was only the railways that kept it fed and enabled it to exist at all as a vast metropolis. More recently, I think it was Andy McNab on some calamity scenario TV programme, who said the collapse of law and order was only three missing meals away.
The story is told at the beginning from the viewpoint of an Asian woman, Tira, who is a resident of London. Thereafter, by being interposed with copies of interrogation and other reports, Adam Roberts deals with the early part of this catastrophe very well. His civilisation finishes with a whimper rather than a bang.
Our heroine eventually decides to head out of London and has to move across the rooftops as the still falling snow has filled the streets to the gutters. All sorts of odd pieces of equipment are used to aid survival but eventually she ends up entombed in a snow buried tower block living of tinned food.
Finally, the lone survivor in the block, she is rescued by men diving down through the hundreds of feet of snow in a vehicle modified to heat its way down through the packed iciness. This, in turn, re-surfaces and is picked up by a hovercraft.
Our heroine finds herself in a survivors town run by the military and which floats on the top of the snow supported by barrage balloons embedded in it. Women are few and she finds herself married to a general who is tipped for the top post 'Interim President' in what is an Atlantic region government.
Tira becomes involved with a man who wants to overthrow the regime and who hints at having proof it was a US government science project that went horribly wrong that led to the snowfall. There are other rumours, that Australia is snow free or that the blizzards were the acts of aliens.
After years, the snowfall eventually stops and Adam Roberts considers how the survivors could manage to survive.
I enjoyed the book but have to say that I thought the first half better than the last part. One can imagine such an apparently endless blizzard would create catastrophe and the author's story is very good at showing how people would cope with this and the sort of society they might create to do so.
However, I think as a story it rather drifts away towards the end and does not achieve the expected promise the writing in the first half led this reviewer to expect.
Paul Hanley
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